In 24 days during the fall of 1946, a German novelist known as Hans Fallada produced a rare, and now especially timely, literary touchstone: a humane depiction of muted resistance. Every Man Dies Alone was based on a Gestapo file detailing the case of a Berlin couple who had run an illicit two-year postcard-writing campaign aimed at rebutting Hitler’s propaganda. The novel was published in 1947—part of a postwar effort to start de-Nazifying German literature.
Mere weeks before his book came out, Rudolf Ditzen (Fallada was a pen name) died at 53, weakened after a long struggle with alcoholism and morphine addiction. He’d faced criminal trouble too (he had shot and killed a friend in a botched suicide pact in adolescence, been twice convicted of embezzlement, and in 1944 been detained in a psychiatric hospital after pulling a gun on his wife). His literary credentials were also vexed. After winning recognition as a promising novelist in the early 1930s, Fallada was labeled an “undesirable author” by the newly installed Nazi regime. Later, in a letter to a friend, he confessed to complicity with the government, admitting that, under threat from Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, he’d altered a novel to have a character join the Nazi Party. Unsurprisingly, Fallada was preoccupied with gray areas in his final book.
His version of the couple in the Gestapo file, whom he names Otto and Anna Quangel, draft a vivid postcard after their only son dies in combat: “Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother, the Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world” is the message they leave in the stairwell of an office building across town, hoping the card will be picked up and shared. Soon, they’re writing and delivering a fresh card or two every week to other addresses in Berlin.
They’re well aware that their fellow Germans might be repelled by the postcards: “Everyone’s frightened nowadays.” Earlier, in their own apartment building, the Quangels themselves had been silent bystanders when tragedy befell an elderly Jewish neighbor, a woman who can’t bear the constraints of living shut away. A jittery Frau Rosenthal flees the hiding place provided by a kind neighbor and returns to her flat, only to leap out her kitchen window to her death when she’s confronted by a Gestapo agent who’s been tipped off by a loathsome Nazi neighbor. “We don’t know anything. We haven’t seen or heard anything,” Otto admonishes his wife as officials gather at the scene.
[From the November 2024 issue: You are going to die]
Now, after their own loss, hopes for their enterprise run high: They distribute the cards so broadly and for so long that it seems they may never get caught. “In the end,” Otto exclaims, “scores of people, hundreds, will be sitting down and writing cards like us. We will inundate Berlin with postcards, we will slow the machines, we will depose the Führer, end the war.”
The Quangels’ dream of overthrowing the regime from within gives Every Man Dies Alone an inspirational core. Lauded for its portrayal of defiance—Primo Levi called it “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis”—it was celebrated anew in 2009 with the arrival, finally, of an English translation by Michael Hofmann, accompanied by biographical and critical commentary in an afterword by the scholar Geoff Wilkes. Fallada’s examination of a social microcosm—one apartment building’s residents in 1940s Berlin—spreads out to encompass the whole city. Capturing both the upright and the compromised, the forceful and the reluctant, the novel becomes a nuanced portrait of the sometimes corrosive, sometimes energizing nature of fear. As Wilkes underscores, Every Man Dies Alone excels at describing something far subtler and harder to discern than staunch resistance: the plight of ordinary Germans at the moment of their greatest moral trial. How, in a climate of absolute fear, do people weigh the decision between rebellion and accommodation? How do they hold on to a sense of decency but also stay alive?
Featuring a cross section of citizenry—pet-shop owners and postal workers, petty criminals and recalcitrant resisters, Gestapo inspectors and persecuted Jews—the novel operates in a haze of daily, lingering dread. The major consequences of relatively minor offenses loom large, as Fallada understood firsthand. By 1940, the year the novel begins, Nazi Party machinery was omnipresent in civilian life. All Germans—not just Jews or Communists or political radicals—were one conversation away from turning informant or resister. Donations to organizations such as the Winter Relief Fund (a charitable front for Nazi fundraising, and one of Otto’s favorite targets in his postcards) were viewed as barometers of one’s fealty. Membership in the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, ostensibly a nationwide union but really a mechanism for keeping a close eye on workers, was practically mandatory for a factory foreman like Otto. A refusal to join the party landed you in its crosshairs, and potentially a labor camp. As Fallada writes, “You could see it with your eyes closed, the way they were making separations between ordinary citizens and party members. Even the worst party member was worth more to them than the best ordinary citizen.”
Agencies such as the Gestapo and the SS (Schutzstaffel, a onetime paramilitary group that became responsible for security and surveillance) overtly monitor and menace Fallada’s Germans. One woman being grilled by a gleeful Nazi is told to leave her husband a note reading, “I’ve popped out to the Gestapo. Don’t know when I’ll be back.” She promptly agrees to become “an eager, unpaid, and invaluable spy.” Others, such as a bartender who ignores a directive to inform on a patron, quietly balk. “On the one hand you were afraid of the Gestapo and lived in constant fear of them,” the narrator observes, “but it was something else to do their dirty work for them.” Civil disobedience is muffled, but gut feelings can prompt small acts of resistance.
The Quangels’ own act of resistance, they realize, could get them killed. But Fallada does not endow them with purely heroic, self-sacrificial fiber. Neither husband nor wife has joined the Nazi Party, though until their son is killed at the front, Otto “has been a believer in the Führer’s honest intentions. One just had to strip away the corrupt hangers-on and the parasites, who were just out for themselves, and everything would get better.” (Fallada himself didn’t become a party member, although he enrolled his son in the Hitler Youth.)
Self-interest sways the Quangels too: Both credit the führer with having helped them manage financially in the mid-1930s, when Otto was out of work. A chapter that was removed from the novel before its publication (but restored after Fallada’s German publishing house rediscovered it in 2011) reveals Anna’s record as a “completely reliable woman” and one of the “hardest workers” in the National Socialist Women’s Organization—before she wrangles her way out of her membership. Fallada highlights the sudden shift in the Quangels’ perspective after their son’s death. The more invested they became in their writing campaign, he explains,
the more mistakes by the Führer and his Party they discovered. Things that when they first had happened had struck them as barely censurable, such as the suppression of all other political parties, or things that they had condemned as merely excessive in degree or too vigorously carried out, like the persecution of the Jews.
One of Fallada’s characters is implausibly angelic, but he isn’t interested in static good or evil. In his pages, righteousness alone rarely motivates opposition to the Nazis. Like the Quangels, some in the novel have become disenchanted with the government after facing personal loss. For others, such as an acclaimed actor who has a trivial disagreement with his friend Goebbels about their opinion of a film and subsequently gets blacklisted, outrage isn’t so much principled as entitled; he’s now “over, chum, finished,” his formerly glamorous life gone. Still others simply think they are canny enough to avoid the brunt of the party’s wrath.
No one who resists, as Wilkes notes in his afterword, leaves a lasting mark. A postal carrier who quits the Nazi Party escapes punishment—but her act of defiance makes no meaningful difference. A low-level con artist who is wrongly accused of distributing the postcards will not concede his guilt; he ends up dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after being given the choice between that and drowning. The members of a small, rebellious cell who begin the novel with grand plans to take down the government end up ineffective and disbanded. And like their real-life counterparts, Otto and Anna are caught, convicted in a sham trial, and sentenced to death by guillotine; their postcards also have none of their intended impact. As treasonous objects, they stir resentment and undermine solidarity. Of the 276 cards the Quangels write, 259 are immediately handed over to the Gestapo. A doctor, after finding one in the hall by his office, thinks, “What a selfish and unscrupulous fellow, this postcard writer, plunging people into such difficulties! Didn’t he think of the trouble he would cause with those confounded cards!”
The trouble, of course, is the point. What makes Every Man Dies Alone so compelling, and unsettling, is its demonstration that an oppressive political sphere works in deeply personal ways. Interactions with the state do not have foregone conclusions—citizens still operate as individuals and make impulsive, sometimes self-sabotaging decisions. Nowhere is that more evident than in the case of Inspector Escherich, the Gestapo agent tasked with finding the writer of the postcards. A former police detective who carries on with his work for the German state simply because he is “a lover of the chase,” he comes to life more fully than any other character in the novel.
Escherich believes himself different from ordinary Nazis—he disdains their midday drinking and derides their lack of intelligence. But as the Javert to the Quangels’ Jean Valjean, he is on the hunt for the perpetrators of a relatively petty crime. And like Javert, he falls victim to his overconfidence. Even after he has failed for months to apprehend the postcard writer, he insolently shrugs off his superiors’ reproaches (Go find another man for the job, he taunts them). In response, his supervisor orders him confined to one of the Gestapo’s infamous basement cells, where he “became so thoroughly acquainted with fear that now there is no chance of him forgetting it for as long as he lives.” Escherich is later released and put back on the case, but his ordeal leaves him bitter toward his overlords and newly respectful of the Quangels’ fervor and determination. He cannot bring himself to actually resist, but he also cannot fully comply. He is, like many Germans, stuck between two impossible options.
The German authorities relied on terror, even toward party members, to keep their citizenry in line. But where they erred, as Fallada writes, was in “the assumption that all Germans were cowards.” No German freedom fighters brought down the government, no anti-propaganda mission persuaded the people to rise up en masse against their tyrants; it took a world war to knock Hitler from his perch. Yet some Germans, Fallada shows, found ways to surmount their fear and assert their moral integrity in acts of dissidence, even if they could not topple the regime.
Every Man Dies Alone is more than an engrossing cat-and-mouse tale. Tracking the interior dodging and weaving of his characters too, Fallada delivers valuable insight into the varieties of mental resistance to autocracy. The quietest kinds of opposition—what we read, what we think, what we believe—can keep autocrats paranoid, distrustful, ill at ease. Rising above cowardice can inoculate us against complicity, as some German citizens showed. And speaking out, even surreptitiously and unsuccessfully, stands in stark contrast to remaining silent. As a young woman explains to Otto before he begins his postcard counterattack, “The main thing is that we remain different from them, that we never allow ourselves to be made into them, or start thinking as they do. Even if they conquer the whole world, we must refuse to become Nazis.”
This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline “How Terror Works.”
The post How Terror Works appeared first on The Atlantic.
